Lucy Hugheshallett

Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing up plans to transport forces to Germany, a nation he assumed would be his ally. Nine months later, after protracted secret negotiations with both groups of combatants, Italy switched allegiance and entered the war on the side of France and Britain. Foreign observers concluded that the Italians were, in Asquith’s words, ‘voracious, slippery and perfidious’.

Listing page content here ‘Who are we? Where are we going? Has public provision been a success?’ These are the kind of ‘weighty, unanswerable’ questions, Jeremy Harding asks himself as he mooches around west London housing estates in search of the mother who gave him up for adoption 50-odd years ago. The questions in Jonathan Maitland’s head are more personal, and considerably more promising as opening lines for a narrative. Was his mother genuinely mistaken when she announced, via the local paper and without preparing her family, that she had inoperable cancer? Or was she brazenly faking to win public sympathy prior to opening England’s first all-gay hotel? Why had the old people’s homes she had previously run been closed down?

Ever since David Steen joined Picture Post at the age of 15 he’s been photographing celebrities. This handsome collection of male portraits shows his range. At one end of the spectrum is the cheesy picture of Steven Spielberg with his foot in the mouth of an inflatable rubber shark. At the other, there is the poignant picture of Augustus John in the year before he died, his head bent over clasped hands as though in prayer, alone in the breakfast room of a provincial hotel, in chilly grey natural light. For the former, Steen flew to Los Angeles (even though Spielberg could only give him an hour) and scouted for props. The latter he got by seren- dipity when, in 1960, he just happened to be staying in the same hotel as John.

Pen Hadow goes to the North Pole quite often. For a price he’ll take you there too. When not under- taking one of his private expeditions he acts as a guide for his own travel company. For those with the time and cash and courage he can organise an arduous months-long trek. If you have to cram your polar adventure into your annual three-week holiday, then you can join one of his ‘Last Degree’ trips: you’ll be dropped by plane some 50 miles short of the Pole and make the last part of the journey over the ice on skis or, if you prefer, by snow-mobile. Hadow has escorted a client suffering from muscular dystrophy, he has posed at the Pole with a wheelchair-bound 11-year-old.

After his father died Blake Morrison wrote an emotive and bravely candid book about him, from which Morrison pŒre emerges as an ebulliently attractive man, but also as a domineering father and an unfaithful husband. Morrison showed the manuscript to his mother. She made no objections, and only one request - that he omit the fact that she had grown up a Roman Catholic. There were people who didn't know, she said, who might be 'shocked'. Morrison made the change, privately wondering why she thought it necessary. It was only when she, in turn, died and he read the letters his parents wrote each other during their wartime courtship that he realised how nearly his mother's Catholicism had cost her her heart's desire.